Facecloths?

Bought a new towel today, so I can go swimming without looking like some kind of ragged pauper, and the woman on the till in the textiles shop asked me "Do you want any facecloths to go with that?" I find that quite offensive, actually. It's like saying "You obviously don't wash your face on any kind of regular basis", and not too far removed from spitting on a hanky and wiping my face for me in full view of the public. I suppose that might be a normal thing to say in textiles shops, actually, since I haven't bought towels for many years, but that was my reaction, anyway. I didn't buy any facecloths.

I didn't go swimming, either, but fate was just conspiring against me there, it wasn't my fault. I woke up at 4am for no readily apparent reason, and wondered if it was my subconscious mind prodding me to talk to my friend on the west coast of the USA who'd been wanting to chat with me for a while, and who would most probably be sitting at his computer in the early evening over there right then. So I got out of bed and found that not only was he online, he'd just sent me a message five minutes before, so naturally we had to have a quick chat. Two and a half hours later, he went to bed and I figured there wasn't much point in me going back to sleep. By nine o'clock I'd changed my mind, since I was feeling like I might fall asleep on the floor at any moment, so I went back to bed and slept till one in the afternoon.

I REALLY need to get a job. This can't be a good way to carry on. My body clock's all out of whack now. Although that might be a good thing - I'm going to Manchester this weekend for my late birthday party, we're all renting a house for the weekend and going to bed at unusual hours is very much the norm at these things.

Might not blog again till Sunday, we'll see - I might bring my laptop with me and share some enlightening drunken ramblings with my loyal readers in a quiet moment.

My bank has become a trendy wine bar

The HSBC in Derby is closing down and moving to a much smaller building down the road, some time next year. It's a real shame, because it's a really impressive big stone bank building of the kind that you practically never see still being banks any more. But apparently it's about ten times bigger than modern banks need, with all this work-of-the-devil internettery and cashpoint machines, so they're selling it.

Maybe the new owners will turn it into a swimming pool. That'll be convenient for me, seeing as I'm the kind of fitness fanatic who goes swimming every day, starting tomorrow. Remember that resolution I made last week to lose a small amount of weight in the next month? Well, swimming is the answer. I would have started today, only I haven't got a decent towel that isn't falling to pieces, and it looked like rain, and it was a bit chilly, and I'd got a new book to read. But tomorrow, definitely.

And I'm also going to write my book tomorrow, too.

Doncaster, synaesthesia and kitty-cats

There can't be many blogs that offer you all three of those in one night.

You may remember that a month or so ago, I wrote about how I'd decided to go to Doncaster, on the grounds that it's quite nearby and I've never been there before. Well, it occurred to me today that I HAVE been to Doncaster, at least once, for an othello championship. It was the nationals, back in 2003, I think, and I played extremely badly. There was also probably a regional in the same place that I went to, as well. It's a good thing that I didn't end up going to Doncaster and expecting it to all be new to me, or I would have been deeply disappointed.

Or maybe not. You never know, since my mind works in strange ways. It's the Champions League football tonight, and I recently found myself thinking that it's unfortunate that Manchester United and Arsenal are playing one night this year, and Chelsea and Liverpool the next, since Man U and Arsenal are very similar teams to each other, as are Chelsea and Liverpool, so viewers who prefer one or the other type of team don't get to watch both their games. I contemplated writing this in my blog, and started trying to put into words exactly why these pairs of teams are alike, and the best I could come up with was that Man U and Arsenal are sort of like a big red cube, whereas Chelsea and Liverpool are more like some kind of wavy line. It makes sense in my brain. Chelsea and Liverpool are very much like the letter C in that respect, whereas the others are more like B or D. I suppose this is the synaesthesia in my family that I've always said I haven't got. Ah well, I'll have to stop denying it in future.

Doncaster is an anagram of 'on red cats'. If you want to read up on red cats, and other kinds, you could certainly do worse than check out http://www.kittiesandcats.com/, a site that's just been set up by a friend of mine. This is an unpaid advertisement, there has been no bribery involved whatsoever, so as a personal favour to me, please go over there and click a google ad or two, even if you loathe and detest cats.

If you loathe and detest cats, by the way, what are you doing being friends with me? I love cats. How dare you say such nasty things about them?

I'm number two!

The very worst, most unoriginal thing you can do with a blog is link to an interesting story on the BBC News website, so in the spirit of that, here is an article all about the talent English sportspeople and teams have for coming second in major international events. I'm proud to be part of that tradition. Who knows, if we work really hard at publicising the world memory championship, I might end up mentioned in the same breath as Lewis Hamilton and Jimmy White.

Which reminds me that the BBC Sports Review Of The Year is coming up soonish (or at least they're already running ads to encourage people to vote for the Personality Of The Year), and I've always thought it would be nice to get a passing mention for mind sports somewhere in the course of that long, dreary, annual celebration of the year's sporting events (or at least those of the year's sporting events that the BBC has the rights to video footage of). I'm not saying I should win the Sports Personality Of The Year award (although I should), just that it would be cool if they'd do a bit about the likes of chess and bridge and things, by way of contrast to the usual stuff on there. There's plenty of interesting stuff to talk about in the world of British mind sports.

And anyway, I'd be a better winner than Zara bleeding Phillips.

Otara Millionaires Club

Yes, today saw the inaugural Online Memory Challenge, and a lot of fun it was too! Two Englishmen, an Australian, a Norwegian, an Indian and a Latvian brought together by the wonders of the internet to compete against each other in a mini-memory championship without having to leave their homes.

Simon Orton (the Australian) has designed a flabbergastingly magnificent website for the purpose - we had three disciplines, five-minute words, five-minute numbers and speed cards, and all we competitors had to do was log in at the right time, chat while we watched the timer counting down the time to the start, and then start memorising when it told us to. The words/numbers/cards appeared on the screen for five minutes (all in the right format and size for easy competition-standard memorisation), then disappeared to be replaced by the recall page. We typed in the answers, and if you finished early you could click a button, the machine instantly calculated your score, and returned you to the spectator lounge, where you could watch everyone else's recall pages being filled in. And laugh at my inability to remember the word 'fauna' - I reeled off the rest of the words with no problem, and then spent the rest of the recall time staring at the blank space and thinking "I know it was some kind of animal, but what kind?" At the last second I took a wild guess at 'goldfish'. Well, it was close.

And you know what? I think this is the future of memory competitions. Not so much the doing it over the internet part (I like to trust my fellow competitors to play fair, but I don't think I'd be entirely comfortable with having the world championship rely on people not sneakily writing down what had appeared on screen), but the computerised aspect. I've always been sceptical when people have suggested doing it all on computers before, but the OMC has converted me. Simon's program worked so smoothly and perfectly, completely without human intervention once the competition had started, that I now believe it would be possible to do this at a real memory championship without it all going horribly wrong.

I'm looking forward to the next OMC - hopefully it will be bigger and better! (And yes, I won this one).

Hey, it's Tegs!

Only he's a gay American now! For want of anything better to do before the rugby tonight, I watched the new American sitcom "The Class" on E4, which the Radio Times had half-heartedly recommended. Although their suggestion to "Keep an eye on this - it could be a grower" is a bit silly - a cursory internet search tells me it's already been cancelled in the US. But it does star Sean Maguire, doing an impressive American accent, and claiming to have gone to school with the other central characters, when we all know he really went to Grange Hill, as Terence "Tegs" Ratcliffe, in my year, before showing up on EastEnders as an Irish football player. The show itself had some funny moments, but not enough to justify watching the rest of the series.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm competing in the first Online Memory Challenge, organised by Simon Orton, which should be fun. Basically a mini-memory championship, all done over the internet with participants promising not to cheat. It'll be a useful bit of practice, an enjoyable experience and hopefully the start of a lot of things like that to come!

Hey, I know him!

Look, Ed Byrne's a guest on Have I Got News For You! I wonder if he mentioned having this memory guy as a guest on The Panel and suggested that I'd make a perfect HIGNFY host?

Actually, it's quite cool how many famous people I've met now. You can hardly turn on the TV without seeing someone I've crossed paths with. As long as you exclusively watch the kind of programmes that Phillip Schofield presents. And yes, I kind of miss all the excitement of being on TV now that the buzz of the world memory championship has died down and I'm a nobody again until next year. Can we have another WMC next week? I'd do badly in it, because I haven't been practicing, but I don't think any of the people who interviewed me this year really knew or cared whether I'd won or not...

Vital statistics

There's the 21st-century equivalent of a speak-your-weight machine in Woolworth's, and I had a go on it yesterday. You tell it how old and male you are and it scans you and does the rest. It gave me a little print-out that says
---------------------------------------------------------
YOUR MEASUREMENTS

Weight.......................12st4.6lb/78.3 kg
Height.......................5ft8.5in/174 cm
Body Fat Estimation:
Fat Index.................21.7%
Fat Mass..................2st9.2lb/16.9 kg
Free F.Mass...............9st9.3lb/61.4 kg
Age and Gender...............31 ♂

REFERENCES

Your Normal Weight is between:
60.6 kg-75.4 kg
9st7.6lb-11st12.2lb
Your current Body Mass Index
is 25.9 kg/m². The Normal B.M.I.
value is between 20 and 24.9

Normal Fat Index............17-23 %
Normal Fat Mass: 12.6-18.3 kg or
1st13.7lb-2st12.3lb

17/10/07,Wednesday...........11:54:59

This in not a medical act.

· Do not self medicate.
· Control your weight.
· Consult your doctor regularly
or pharmacist.
---------------------------------------------------------

Well, I thought I should share it. You all want to know everything about me, right? In my defence, I had just had a Drifter and a can of cherry coke (yes, I eat sweets before lunchtime and ruin my appetite), and I was wearing my shoes and clothes and hat, that has to add a bit of extra weight.

I'm not sure I should take advice on losing weight from any machine that says "this in not a medical act", but you know, maybe I should make an effort to get back into my Normal Weight range. It wouldn't take too much effort, would it? Half a stone? Any old fool can lose that much. You just have to go to the world memory championship for a day. I think I might make this a project. November 17th, I'll go back to the machine and see if it tells me I'm Normal!

Note for Americans - 14 pounds to a stone. Do the math, if you really want to.

Reader mail

Thanks to Boris, Gregory and Mike for responding to my request for subjects to write about! This is going to be a long (and hopefully interesting) blog entry...

I´d like to read, how your telephone interview went like.

Really? Because last night, sitting down and intending to write about my telephone interview was what made me think 'this blog of mine is getting really boring nowadays'. But hey, if you really want to know about my half-hearted job-hunting... It went quite well, really. I was talking to the financial director and an HR person - this job reports directly to the FD, which is a bit unusual, there's normally another level separating the big boss from the management accountant - and I think I mostly gave the impression of knowing what I'm talking about. I did have one embarrassing blank spot though - they asked me the routine question of what I know about their company, and I suddenly realised I couldn't think of anything. It's the telephone's fault (curse you, Alexander Graham Bell!), because normally while I'm travelling to an interview, I take a printout of interesting pages from the company website with me and read through them, memorising useful snippets of information. In this case, I hadn't done that and couldn't even remember which of the various companies I've been looking at lately I was talking to at that moment. I stumbled through it in the end, and I do have the Excel skills they want (and very few people do have that level of ability), so we'll see if I get a second interview. If I do, that one will be face-to-face, at least.

Do you have any ideas on how to make memory sports more popular especially for new competitors with and without taking into account limits on people and money to do the necessary tasks?

Yes, I do. I think a large part of any plan to increase the popularity of 'memory sports' would have to be to make the general public aware of its existence, and to give them the impression that it's something anyone can do, and have fun doing! I would like to see a televised memory championship along the lines of the US Championship, only with more emphasis on the numbers and cards, so as to show off the more impressive skills of the European competitors. This TV competition (which would be made in a swish TV studio with groovy graphics and things) would be in addition to, not replacing, the normal memory competitions, and would mainly be to highlight to the general public what's possible with memory skills. I think it'd get a good audience on Channel 4.

Apart from that, what we need is more publicity, and a lot more teaching of memory skills at a basic level to people who've never heard of it before. This is something that's been done in Germany but has been completely neglected in Britain in the past. There are plans in the works right now for a couple of different projects to go into schools and universities and organise competitions - one of them is being organised by the WMSC, and so probably won't happen (they're good at planning things but not at actually doing anything about their plans), the other is by someone else and really is likely to make a difference and bring in more competitors.

One more thing we need, naturally, is more championships, with accessible locations, lots of advance publicity and maybe even some prize money. Most championships in the past have managed one or two of the three - if someone manages to hold a competition that brings all of those together, it really will excite interest on a much wider scale.

Discuss the developments in England between 1815-1832. Explain why Parliament eventually chose to pass the reform bill of 1832.

Something that I think is often neglected in discussion of the buildup to the Great Reform Bill (which wasn't really all that great, if you ask me, although at least it laid the groundwork for later electoral reforms that really achieved something) is the role of the monarchy. People answering this kind of essay question like to say how the industrial revolution and the defeat of Napoleon had given the average Briton more time on their hands to complain about iniquities, without looking at the way Parliament had gradually assumed a much more important role in recent years, due to the diminishment of the traditional role of the King.

Until after the end of the 18th century, there was still a general feeling that Parliament existed to fulfil its traditional role of gathering together important people to advise the King on how to rule his country. George III had always taken a very active part in politics, but by 1815 he was incurably insane and his fat, lazy, useless son was technically in charge of Britain. George IV wasn't interested in politics at all, unless it directly affected his plans to stuff his face and have fun, and reduced his role in the great events of the day to agreeing with whatever politician had spoken to him last. Parliament for the first time in many years was free to do what it wanted, without the monarch butting in. Naturally, the likes of Earl Grey took the opportunity to make the Commons into a fairer representation of the average working man.

I'm in college and this is a question our professor gave us in advance for Donnerstag. can you give some advice on how one can utilize memory techniques in essay writing?

No. No, I really can't. I've never used memory techniques for essay writing or anything vaguely like it. I use memory techniques for the sole purpose of trying and failing to win the world memory championship, not in any everyday-life application.

Is there a way to make a journey follow the ideas of an essay? I suppose you could use the same strategy that you employ for poems, but I think the richness of imagery in poetry lends itself to mnemonics much more easily. What mnemonic techniques could I use for this essay for example?

Well, I suppose you could use a journey to sort concepts or ideas into the sequence that you're intending to use them. I think that's what the books on the subject advise you to do, anyway, although I have no idea whether it would work or not. Or you could use the kind of technique we use in the 'historic dates' discipline to associate images with the year and the events that happened in it - 1832 for me is the obscure 1940s superhero the Fin (he wore a suit with a big shark fin on his head); I'd imagine him lecturing parliament or maybe rampaging through a rotten borough, denouncing it loudly, and probably drinking Earl Grey tea as he did so. That's quite fun, actually. 1833, abolition of slavery - the characters from badly-written preschool children's TV show the Fimbles, slaving away in chains being whipped by that frog they hang out with, until they're liberated. 1834, Tolpuddle Martyrs - a muscleman ('virile man' is the phrase, for anyone who's following the Ben-system logic) being loaded onto a ship, singing trade union songs in a manly kind of way. I could work through a whole history book like this. Maybe I should...

write about your teenage years =D

Well, my teenage years were in the early nineties, so I'm not sure it would mean anything to a current teenager like you. If memory serves, I mainly spent my time waiting for the internet to be invented. Well, that and playing chess. A gang of us at school used to spend every spare moment playing chess. Which is what the cool kids did in those days. All the handsome, athletic types were deeply envious of us. Really.

Apart from that, I don't think I ever really did anything worth writing about. I was living in the middle of nowhere with my dad and brother, going to Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle, as previously mentioned, and generally not working as hard as I should, if at all. Then I left school and briefly went to Kingston University before giving it up as a bad idea, then went to a training centre to do an NVQ in accountancy, then got a job, then stopped being a teenager.

Outside my own life, things of vague interest were happening. I remember being excited when Margaret Thatcher resigned when I was 14 - she'd been PM since I was two and a half, so deep down I still think she's really cool, despite all rational thought on the subject. I also remember hearing that John Smith had died - I was in the sixth form common room and someone had been listening to the radio on a walkman. When he heard the headline, he got up and turned on the radio to play it to the whole room. That's one of those rare moments where I really do remember where I was when it happened.

Being Boring

You know, I get the feeling that I haven't written anything interesting in this blog lately. I think it's mainly because I haven't done anything interesting lately, but I still feel guilty about depriving my readers of interesting babblings every evening. So I'd like to ask for suggestions - what should I write about? I mean, I generally write this thing to entertain myself, but it would be nice to know what my various weird readers enjoy reading about and what they don't. Someone tell me what to write, and I'll do it tomorrow. That way I don't have to think of something myself, and I preserve my brain cells, in case I need them later.

Everyone wants a piece of me

One advantage (possibly the only advantage) to being imminently featured on a Channel 5 documentary is that it makes it easier to decline offers to be the subject of other documentaries. Another producer called me today, thinking of making a documentary about me (she'd looked me up in the electoral roll, she said - I never cease to be amazed by the ways people go to get in contact with me. Just put my name into google, you'll even find my phone number quoted without my permission in a press release...), but was easily deterred when I pointed out that a documentary about me is in the final stages of editing at the moment. Nick says I'll like it - I very much doubt that I will, but we'll see.

I was less successful in saying no to the one accountancy recruitment agency who I neglected to tell that I don't want any more temp jobs, when they called a bit later on to offer me an interview-followed-by-immediate-start kind of thing at Bombardier the train people down the road, lasting till Christmas doing project work of some kind. It's on Thursday, unless I find a way to get out of it.

Before that, though, there's a telephone interview tomorrow for a real job, with Proquest in Cambridge, which sounds like it might be fun. It's a very Excel-heavy job, that sounds like it might be right up my street, although they might want some more VBA programming experience than I've got. I got a crash-course book to refresh my knowledge of it, and I'm pleased to see that I do mostly know what I'm doing after all. Might be a cool job, if it works out. But telephone interviews are a terrible thing. I hate phone calls in general, and especially phone calls when they're important. What's wrong with dressing up in smart clothes and shiny shoes and talking to people face to face? Yes, I dislike that too, but not as much as telephone interviews.

I want a star!

Roger Moore got a star on the walk of fame for his birthday, and I want one too! I could be an actor. The evil English genius, as someone suggested recently. Still hoping someone plays me that way in the movie of "Moonwalking With Einstein". Or I think I'd make a good evil scientist in a Japanese monster movie, the kind who starts out seeming like one of the good guys, but turns out to in fact want the monster to destroy Tokyo.

Anyway, happy birthday to me, and Roger, and Cliff Richard, the late E E Cummings and the very late Battle of Hastings, and Jason (someone on the rugby coverage was just holding up a sign saying "happy birthday Jason"). Also, happy birthday yesterday to the other Ben Pridmore on Facebook (the one who formerly had dreadlocks) - had I been born five minutes earlier, we'd have shared a birthday as well as a name and a fondness for silly hairstyles. We should have had a double party, open only to people called Ben Pridmore who are celebrating a birthday this weekend. It would have been great.

Also, you should watch Pillow's Pillow's Story, made years ago but I've only just discovered it's on YouTube. The voice of the pillow is my brother.

Try, try again

The commentator on the rugby tonight described Sébastien Chabal as 'the 21st century Asterix', because he's really large. Honestly, what do they teach them at school nowadays?

Watching the game right now, after the football this afternoon, not to mention a bit of golf before that. It's not my fault if I haven't achieved anything productive today, it's the TV people.

Also, yes, Boris, got your emails, I'll reply as soon as I get a chance. Likewise James, and no doubt lots of other people too. I'm just lazy. As you can see from the short blog entry tonight.

Nimble fingers!

Woo! I memorised a pack of cards in 23.05 seconds today! I should have switched to that shuffling-the-cards-between-my-fingers method years ago! It really is a lot quicker than turning them over two at a time, and it didn't take long to get used to it at all. I've hardly done any practice since the world championship, and I'm well over two seconds better than my previous best. I might just beat 25 seconds in a competition next year!

I also did a perfect 200 in spoken numbers today, for the first time ever. So all in all, I'm extremely happy with myself and in the mood to boast to everybody else in the world that I'm better than them. On the other hand, what I actually need to work on if I'm going to win the blasted WMC next year is the long events - it wasn't really the speed cards that lost me the world championship this year, it was the mess I made of the hour cards, and that was all down to me not having practiced the long disciplines enough, and built up the stamina you need to memorise for hours and hours over a three-day period. I would vow to spend all this weekend doing hour cards, hour numbers and half-hour binary, but a) you all know I wouldn't do it anyway and b) it's my birthday and I don't want you to think I'm a complete saddo.

Although I'm not having a party for another fortnight, and I don't actually have any plans for Sunday. Maybe I am a complete saddo...

Should've wispaed a bit louder

I was quite surprised to read on Sam's blog that Wispas are being re-launched. I'd genuinely never noticed that they'd stopped selling them. Four years ago. How could that, and the subsequent internet campaigns and petitions, have passed me by so completely? It's not like I'm one of those health-food-eating, chocolate-hating weirdos you hear about - whenever I'm passing a newsagent or corner shop, I'll have a choc bar of some description. I quite like Wispas. Has it really been four years since I had one?

What other confectioneries might have been scrapped without my noticing? I'll have to take a thorough inventory of all the sweetie shelves in Derby. Trying to think what chocolate bars I haven't seen lately... Do they still make Topics? Never liked them, but haven't seen one for a while. I'm pretty sure they stopped making Fuse bars, which is a shame, because they were great. I think I heard something about Ripples recently, too - have they stopped, or restarted, those? I remember when they first came out. Wispas too. It's disgraceful that they should stop selling these things without asking me first.

Gizza job

So, I promised you a funny story about jobs, didn't I? Well, I had an email from D E Shaw & Co, an American investment company that has a tradition of employing people with impressive mental abilities - chess champions, international maths olympiad medallists, that kind of thing, and they suggested I might want to apply for a job with them, seeing as I won the decamentathlon in 2001.

That's right, the decamentathlon - the little four-hour MSO competition involving solving puzzles in ten different 'mind sports'. Not the memory stuff, they'd never even heard of that, nor the mental calculation competitions, or the World Intelligence Championship I also won in 2001, or even my amazing skill as an othello player, but they were really impressed by the decamentathlon. I've always kind of thought it would be cool if some company wanted to employ me solely for the purpose of boasting that they employed a memory champion, but I never expected something like this.

Of course, if it was the kind of company that hired people solely on the strength of their decamentathlon performances, it really wouldn't be the kind of company I'd want to work for (it would also be the kind of company that goes out of business very very quickly), and once they'd seen my CV, they let me know that as expected, your background and accomplishments are impressive, and it is clear that you have much to offer. While we have not been able to identify an immediate opportunity that would be a good match for you, we will keep your resume in our files on the chance that a suitable position should become available at a later date. In the meantime, we wish you much success in all your endeavors.

Still, it would have been groovy to work in New York. Perhaps I should think more about applying for jobs in America - there are, I'm reliably informed by non-American comedians, lots of really stupid and wealthy people over there, and perhaps there really is a company out there that would want me as a sort of trophy employee, paying me a small fortune and not expecting me to actually do any work. And then I'd be able to compete in the US Memory Championship too! And attempt to qualify for the US othello team (although that's generally just as difficult, if not more so, as qualifying for the British team, so it's probably not worth emigrating just for that).

On the other hand, I have got an interview lined up (sort of - haven't fixed the date yet) with a company in Cambridge. Emigrating to Cambridge would be quite cool, too.

Sequel

Bumped into I'm-almost-certain-her-name's-Sarah-now again today. It's like buses - you don't see a bus for two years after you and the bus were both made redundant from the same company, then you see the bus in town twice on consecutive days. But she had her daughter with her this time, so that resolves that minor mystery that was puzzling me yesterday. And as a follow-up to what I was going on about the day before yesterday, the new shopping centre in Derby was officially opened today! I'm disappointed that they didn't ask me to cut the ribbon, but never mind. Anyway, it's really big and shiny and new and full of exciting things. I'm all in favour of it! It really makes a difference to have a real shopping centre in the city - all this time I've been living in Derby I could just hear Nottingham sneering at us, mocking the size of our mall. "I've got two gigantic ones," it said, "and all you've got to offer is this tiny little one-storey thing." Well, nyah nyah, Nottingham, now Derby's got a cool place to go and look at shops too!

Wow, I'm almost feeling a sense of civic pride here. I must have been brainwashed by the local media.

Sonic 2

Wow, but Sonic 2 is a great game! I haven't played it for years, and it was wonderful to remember all the little bits and pieces of it. I can't believe it's 15 years since it came out. If they'd make video games like that nowadays, I might still play them.

But that isn't quite all I've done today, don't worry. I've also done a bit of memory practice and applied for a couple of jobs - one which would be extremely groovy but is very unlikely to happen (won't go into detail yet in case I jinx it, I'll tell you a funny story about it when they tell me I haven't got it), and another which would also be rather cool, to a slightly lesser extent, but which I think there's a better chance of success with. Then there's other memory-related things that might happen and be groovy, but I'm not supposed to write about them either until everything's set up, so never mind. This is a terribly uninformative blog post, isn't it?

I also bumped into probably-Sarah who I worked with at almost-definitely-Parkhouse today, and spent the ensuing friendly conversation (carefully structured to avoid revealing that I'm only 70% certain of her name) resolving to make a real effort to memorise people's names and personal details in future, in case I need to talk to them a couple of years down the road. It'll reduce the need to exchange pleasantries like 'how's the daughter or possibly son that I'm fairly sure you had?'

Sonic 3

The big shopping centre in Derby has been a building site for just about as long as I can remember (so at least a week, then), but the new-look, much-bigger-than-before, all-different Westfield Centre is opening on Tuesday. It's terribly exciting. Makes me wonder what will happen to the army of builders who've been hanging around the city centre having tea-breaks for twelve hours a day, every day for the last couple of years. But to explain the title of this blog post, you can see into the new section from the back of W H Smith, with its shiny new empty shops and gleaming new escalators, but you can't get into it yet. It reminds me of the classic video game, Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Not that Sonic 3 was set in a shopping centre (although that would have been cool), but it was released in a hurry, before they'd finished programming it. It's a cool game,

(I must just interrupt myself here to record the fact that an absolutely gigantic spider has just nonchalently strolled across my living room floor. Don't know where he came from, but that maybe explains why I haven't been bothered with flies so much this year. The thing's the size of a house!)

but it's really obviously not finished, because there are parts when you can see into big sections of the game that you can't get into. If you do the cheat that lets you pass through walls, you can see these big sections generally have bits missing, or stop dead at unexpected points. A bit later they released 'Sonic and Knuckles', which you could plug Sonic 3 into and get the full game as it should have been if they'd been able to take their time making it in the first place. That shopping centre has really put me in the mood to get my old mega drive out and play through all the Sonic games. I can see that's what I'm going to spend tomorrow doing, rather than anything halfway useful. Somebody tell me off, will you? I need discipline.

Hey, wait a minute, I've stopped being famous!

Apart from the Channel 5 photo shoot, I've got nothing lined up or likely to be lined up in terms of memory publicity. Does this mean I'm settling back into comfortable obscurity again? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Tell you what, let's call it a bit of breathing space to write my book and then decide if I want to try to publicise it.

Anyway, it's my birthday next Sunday! Thirty-one years old! Who'da thunk it? I'm going to think of some more new-year-of-my-life resolutions and see if I can achieve them this time. I'm not having the party till a fortnight afterwards, so perhaps I'll spend the day in quiet reflection wailing and lamenting my old age, screaming curses at the gods and attempting to hypnotise myself into believing I'm still a young vigorous twenty-something. Or maybe I'll go out drinking. We'll have to see.

Losing track of time

What with going to London yesterday, I spent the whole day thinking it was Saturday. On the train ride home I repeatedly caught myself wondering what had happened in the football and looking forward to watching the highlights. Which is particularly silly, since most of this weekend's games are on Sunday anyway. But it's carried over into today, and I'm still feeling like it's Sunday night right now.

Of course, my life is a succession of Saturdays and Sundays at the moment, so it doesn't make much difference, but it's still nice to know that there's another weekend starting tomorrow, right after this one. I really need to get a job, though - a couple of interesting prospects in the pipeline, we'll have to see what develops.

Humans 1, Chimps 0

Yes, I succeeded in performing a memory test similar but not identical to the one that the Japanese chimps do. Which is good, because they'd also tried it on the average man on the street in Hammersmith, and apparently the general public struggled with it. So I defended the intellectual honour of the human race there. And a bit earlier on in Soho I recited pi to a thousand places for Tiger Aspect productions, which was fun. I'd insisted on doing that, just because I wanted a change from the inevitable pack of cards I always do for these people (I also did a pack of cards for Blink, the TV company with the monkeys*). And I think I got it right, too, after a bit of revision on the train journey from Derby.

And speaking of memory, if you send a company an email about a job, mention the memory stuff in it, and forget to attach your CV, that's probably not a good move, is it?

Also, check out Gaby Kappus's website for a very cool picture of me!


*Monkeys aren't chimps, and vice versa, I'm well aware of that. But I think 'monkeys' sounds funnier in a blog post.

Pin-up

So, down to London tomorrow for two different TV thingies, one of which involves monkeys. It was nearly three things - Channel 5 emailed today to say they want to do a photo shoot promoting the famous documentary, and I suggested tomorrow since I'll be in London anyway. But apparently that's too short notice. Presumably it takes a lot of planning, working out how to make me look attractive, intelligent or stupid, depending what slant the documentary is trying to take. Also, I forgot to ask if they're still going to call it "Brain Men". If they do, I'm going to decry it loudly in public and attempt to drag them through every court in the land, because that's a really rubbish title. For one thing, there's already a documentary about memory-related stuff called "Brain Man" - it's the American title of that one about Daniel Tammett that's called "The Boy With The Incredible Brain" or something equally silly in Britain. For another thing, "Brain Men" just sucks. It's okay making a reference to "Rain Man" in a documentary about a guy who goes around proclaiming that he's a savant, but it doesn't work for something that's rather further removed from the whole freaks-of-nature kind of angle. Hopefully. Unless they cut out all the bits where we demonstrate that memory techniques are something that any old idiot can do.

Still, it's probably a good thing that we're not doing photo shoots tomorrow, because I haven't got any trousers. I was basically down to my last good pair of trousers, the black ones, but the zip's gone and I need to get it fixed in order to go out and not get arrested. So I've been wearing my cords for the last couple of days, because they're almost acceptable except for a smallish hole that people can't see unless they limbo-dance underneath my spread legs. And I doubt that's likely to happen to me any time soon. But you never know what angles the Channel 5 people might want to photograph me from.

Maybe I'll get some new trousers tomorrow. They have clothes shops in London, right?

Yawn

I'm watching a particularly dull football game tonight, and it seems to have drained my brain of anything fun or exciting to talk about. I have had a sort of job offer that made me giggle, but I don't really want to write about it now in case it's genuine and they're reading my blog (see, I'm paranoid about that kind of thing now). So this is just going to be one of those blog posts where I apologise for not saying anything in my blog post and leave it at that. Sorry!

Áth Cliath

In Dublin's fair city, and so on. The TV people flew me out there with Ryanair, which is the first time I've done that. It's actually a perfectly okay airline, and I'll have to fly on the cheap with them again. The plane was delayed, but only by an hour or so, and I had plenty of time to hang out with Charlie and watch Ireland be comprehensively outclassed by Argentina in the rugby, before being driven out to Blanchardstown and the Draoicht Theatre, to film The Panel.

I found out talking to the various staff of the Panel that it was originally an Australian show, and their Irish counterparts bought the format from them. Since the show consists of five people sitting around a desk and making jokes about the news, I don't see that they needed to spend money on it, but then I don't work in TV. I also got to sit around the green room with the very cool James Cromwell. Having read the website's blurb about him, I'd concluded that I'd never heard of him before, and it was only this morning that I re-read it, even the sentence I'd skipped previously, and realised I'd been hanging out with Zefram Cochrane! For crying out loud! How did I not realise that at the time?

Anyway, the show was quite groovy, and the makeup artist recognised me and thought she'd made me up before, only for it to turn out that she'd seen me on This Morning, and actually remembered me! But it wasn't one of my greatest performances. I've never done TV in front of a live audience before, unless you count Caldeirão do Huck in Brazil. But the audience there, consisting of scantily-clad young women, were there to jump up and down excitedly regardless of what was happening in front of them. I've never played to an audience who react to the people on stage before. And when I said something that was supposed to be funny (I can't remember what it was, and I'm sure it wasn't funny at all, but that's not the point) and got just a couple of scattered chuckles, it made me a bit over-conscious of their presence, and I spent the rest of the interview glancing at the crowd of shadowy watchers and trying to make them laugh at me properly.

But I did memorise a pack of cards and generally give the impression of being good at memorising a pack of cards, so what more could I want? Well, actually, I'll answer that - both on the show and talking before, nobody wanted to ask me anything not related to memory. Whereas with James Cromwell, everyone immediately started asking him about his political views and opinions on the state of the world. I'd like to be asked that kind of thing from time to time. Not so much because I want to convert people to my political viewpoint, or even because I want the world to know it - it would just be nice if people wanted to know that I've got one. So my new ambition is to do a TV show where someone asks me a non-memory question! That way I will be able to proudly say that I'm not just a bit of two-minute filler, but a Real Celebrity Guest!

(Probably not going to happen, is it?)

Bons mots

Have you ever spontaneously said something really funny and clever, but in a context that takes so long to explain that you can never repeat it to anyone without making it a long, boring anecdote? Well, to heck with it. Even though the line itself isn't funny unless you were there at the time, here's an abridged-as-humanly-possible summary of the online conversation.

Me: Yes, I forgot to take my hat when I got off the train. Twice.
Friend: Tut, didn't you read the manual? Rule one: Never take the hat off.
Me: (reading manual) Hey, also, you're not supposed to keep chickens in one.
Friend: Yep, I had a problem with that once. So many eggs...
Me: That's only a problem if you forget to check it's empty before you put it on. And even if you do, you can always quip "Boy, do I have egg on my face!"

Anyway, Dublin beckons! It's a flying visit, in more ways than one, I'll only be on Irish soil for about 24 hours, but in that time I'll get to hang out and watch the rugby with Charlie Garavan (who conveniently lives very close to my hotel) as well as talk with The Panel about memory and hats. I even get a write-up on their website!

Where the hell is the thunderstorm coming from?

In honour of Blogger's continuing corruption by the German language, and the fact that I found an old Fix & Foxi comic in my flat today, I'd like to share with you the one-page English-language comic strip it contains. Fix and Foxi are popular German comic and cartoon stars, and they help to teach young Germans to speak English, too. It's very impressive, and the kind of thing that really should happen in British comics too - if I'd grown up reading Dennis the Menace occasionally having adventures in German, maybe I'd be able to hold a conversation with all those fluent-English-speaking German and Austrian memorisers.

Still, much as I admire the good intention of the uncredited writer of this story, I do have to giggle at the quality of the translation - the grammar is just plain wrong in a couple of cases, but my favourite line has to be the one I've titled this blog post with. Teaching small children to say "Where the hell" could get them in trouble if they go to America, where that kind of talk can shock and horrify people.

So sit back and enjoy Foxi burning Lupo's house to the ground (it's okay, because it's educational).

I'm pretty sure nobody ever taught me the German for 'tranquilizer' (even if they didn't spell it right) in all my years of education. So it's not my fault I can't speak the language.

Woo! I did it!

No, not achieved anything noteworthy like writing my book, but I did manage to say no to someone on the phone today. Regular readers will know this is something I find impossible, but this afternoon when I got an email from a guy at Radio Solent followed immediately by a phone call from the same guy asking me to be on the breakfast show early tomorrow morning, giving tips on how to remember answers to quiz questions, I politely declined. Even when he continued to try to persuade me to do it, even after I'd explained that I'm rubbish at remembering facts, or anything halfway useful. I felt quite pleased with myself.

I did agree to another TV thing, but just a quick bit of filming for a taster sequence for some kind of ITV show currently in development about impressive mental and physical abilities. I'm going to do that next Thursday, since I'm already in London that day being shown up by a chimp. It's funny how the requests keep rolling in lately - I didn't get asked to do anywhere near this much when I actually won the world championship. And I don't even think Tony's publicity people are pestering the press about me any more either.

In other news, while I may not have achieved anything noteworthy today, I did give blood, and that's the kind of thing that makes up for being otherwise a lazy slob who cares about nothing but his next television appearance. The blood people who do the health check form had never heard of Bahrain and had to look it up in the book to see if you can donate after visiting there. You can. It must be a healthy place.

Oo, Blogger's gone German again! Tastaturkürzel: drücken Sie Strg zusammen mit: B = Bold. I thought it had fixed itself...

History

Of all the creatures in the world, except for gazelles, the one most loathed by Winston Churchill was the pelican. He had developed a deep-seated prejudice against them during the Crimean War, when he had read a book that mentioned pelicans the day before getting his legs blown off by an exploding gazelle. During his lifetime he would regularly take a break from his prime ministerial duties and go to London Zoo to complain about the number of pelicans housed there, and after his death his ghost could occasionally be observed wandering the streets and muttering unpleasant slurs against pelicans and those who support them.

The irony is that Churchill spent his entire life and afterlife under the mistaken impression that pelicans were a kind of insect. The book he had been reading, "Weevils!" by Charles Dickens, only mentioned the birds in passing without giving a detailed description, and his copy of the only other book then published that mentions pelicans, "Weevils!" by George Eliot, had been eaten by a gazelle before Churchill had a chance to open it.

In speeches in Parliament, Churchill would frequently compare his political enemies to pelicans, referencing their scuttling movements, many legs and habit of causing damage to crops. 'Pelican crossings' were so named by special order of Anthony Eden, just to get on Churchill's nerves. A plan to replace the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar square with a giant bronze pelican, approved by the Commons and Lords in 1972 in what became known as the Teaching Winston Churchill A Lesson For Being So Fat And Stupid Act, was abandoned when it was realised that Churchill had died several years previously and wouldn't have recognised the statue as being a pelican anyway, because of the aforementioned confusion.

On the other hand, pelicans generally liked Winston Churchill. His approval rating among pelicans and simliar species polled at London Zoo varied from 89% during the war years to 69.7% in the late fifties. Giraffes, staunch socialists all, were much less supportive of his policies, while the gazelles refused even to answer questions on the subject for fear of Russian reprisals.

A follow-up to last Tuesday's post

No, actually, I mean the Tuesday before last. The one where I talked about Batman and Doris Day. You know, the 1960s Batman series is rubbish! This isn't one of those cases where fond childhood memories make for entertaining viewing as a cynical thirty-something. I must have grown into a bitter old man accidentally. And the "Legends" documentary tonight was Alma Cogan, who's definitely dead, so there were no shocking revelations there either.

But on the other hand, Ripping Yarns is on right now and it's Across The Andes By Frog. Yay!

I really need to do stuff with my life...

I hate unsolved mysteries

This morning I had a tune in my head. It was a catchy tune, but I had no idea where it came from or what the words to it were, if any. Since I was in town, I whistled it to myself to keep it flowing through my brain so that I could hum it to someone later and find out what it was, because it was bugging me. But then I walked through the market and on a tailor's stall there was a sign advertising "SHORTNING TROUSERS £6.99", which of course immediately started my brain singing that mama's little babies love short'ning trousers and wiped out the previous tune, whatever it was. So now I'll never know.

I can't imagine a stall in Derby's indoor market does much business in shortening people's trousers for £6.99, anyway.

Anyway, the day wasn't a complete loss. I did some practice with cards and found that I can still do a pack comfortably under 30 seconds and get it right two times out of three. That was turning it over in the old way, following which I tried a couple of packs shuffling them between my hands in the way that I think could be faster if I work on it, but it's going to take me a while before I can do that as impressively. Need to train my fingers to move in different ways.

Tomorrow I'm going to a recruitment agency in Birmingham for a registration interview arranged last week, despite the whole publicly-announcing-that-I-maybe-don't-want-to-be-an-accountant thing that several of my readers have pointed out might have been a bad idea. Although I said I'd pad out my CV a bit more (even though the CV they have is the one prepared by the Nottingham branch of the same agency on my behalf) and I haven't done it yet. Feels like I haven't done my homework and the teacher's going to tell me off.

Is there a job where the ideal qualifications are fatness and laziness?

Well, I didn't do any memory training today. In fact, I've done nothing at all all day, unless you count doing a couple of extra-difficult hanjie puzzles and watching a heck of a lot of sport, sitcoms and cartoons on telly. I haven't written my book either, and you promised to pester me about it, so it's your fault, readers. There are times when I'm frankly disgusted with myself. What I need is a slavedriver, to force me to do things that I really want to do but am too idle to actually sit down to. Where does one hire a slavedriver these days?

I have been thinking, though. Did I tell you I've left my job at NCN now? No, that's right, I deliberately refrained from mentioning it because I felt vaguely ashamed of being voluntarily unemployed again. But frankly, that's silly. It wasn't much of a job, and if I can't get a good permanent job that I really like (which, judging by the last few months, is surprisingly hard to do), I don't need to spend my time doing temp jobs (even temp-with-the-possibility-of-making-it-perm-later jobs like that one) that I don't particularly enjoy.

In fact, to take things one step further, I think I might have issues with the whole accountancy thing. Perhaps it's time to stop saying that I don't want to try to make a living from the memory stuff, and really try it to see if it actually is possible. You never know, I might like it. And now's the time to try, while I still have money sitting around in the bank. If I'm honest about things, a main reason I've been reluctant to try it before is that I didn't want people to think I can't hold a proper job like a normal person. Well, I think I can get round that mental block if I really try - after all, I'm nearly 31, I've been an accountant for well over ten years now, my mother's going to be disappointed in me whatever I choose to do for a living and everybody else actually would think I was quite cool if I was a professional memory man.

So I'll give it a go, while still looking for a good office job at the same time. I'll sit down and work on the book, and also look into performances and TV appearances and writing other things and so on. Yay! This is the dawn of a bright new era, or else the dawn of a lot more sitting around doing hanjie puzzles and watching telly. We'll see.

Practice makes 90% accurate

I need to do some memory training. Haven't done any since the world championships, demonstrations for journalists and TV people aside, and I need to stay in shape all year if I'm going to actually win the blasted world memory championship next time round. I also need to work on memorising cards by shuffling them between my hands (like I was doing on This Morning), rather than turning them over like I normally do. I'm pretty sure I could go faster if I do it that way, but it'll take me a while to get used to it. But there's just not so much motivation to practice when there isn't a competition for so long. Anyone out there want to organise one for me?

Someone pimp me!

Ever have one of those days when it feels like you've done nothing but talk to TV people? Well, I might be exaggerating things here, but I did talk to two different TV people today in a matter of minutes, and that's two more than I talk to in an average day. So I'm going to Ireland for September 30th, to be gently derided by comedians, and London on October 4th to test my memory against the best the non-human world can offer. Also, you can see my This Morning performance here. Enjoy! (It's not very exciting.)

Maybe I should get an agent. An agent could talk to these people for me and just give me the edited highlights. And an agent might be able to persuade some of these TV people to pay me actual money for these TV appearances. That'd be cool.

On the panel

I've heard on the grapevine that Irish TV show "The Panel" want me on. I don't know the show, but I can only assume they have a sort of guess-the-nonentity kind of sequence, a la Never Mind The Buzzcocks. You can watch an episode on the website, in which the panellists discuss the Irish elections in an entertaining way. I have secretly always wanted to be on Have I Got News For You, this could be a step in the right direction...

Incidentally, everyone who watched This Morning (a list which seems to consist of Grandma and Ian) says it was great. I'm a star!

This Morning, this afternoon and my pants

This Morning was great fun. They cut my bit shorter than planned to make way for some 'breaking news' about Madeleine McCann (I tell you, it's hard to be a minor celebrity right now), but I still got to chat with Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton, memorise a pack of cards and impress an audience of millions. Well, thousands, at least, I'm not sure what kind of viewing figures they get. I also got Phillip to give me an autograph for my grandma ("To Dorothy, lots of love"), which will make her day - she fancies him. Meeting him was rather groovy for me too, I grew up watching him presenting children's BBC and it's strange to realise that he's actually a real person.

This afternoon, I had to hurry back to Derby for my interview with DHL. However, I got a bus that I thought would take me there only to find that it had dropped me at a different DHL place miles away, with no way to get to the right place. So no new job there, but never mind. If I can't get there by public transport, it's not the job for me anyway.

Also, I'm confused about my pants. I have two pairs of green tartan boxer shorts that are seriously falling to pieces ('more holey than righteous', as Grandma says), so I don't wear them much. At least I think I don't, but I've noticed that every time I take a load of washing out of the machine, those old green pants are in there, without me remembering wearing them. It's very strange. Is someone breaking into my flat on a regular basis, wearing my pants and putting them in the wash?

It's in the bag

I've just packed my trusty rucksack to go down to London tonight. I'm worried that it might be reaching the end of its lifespan, though - at the othello at the weekend, the remaining zipper came off and I can't get it back on, so it's going to remain closed for all eternity now. This isn't an insurmountable problem, because of the big hole through which I normally put things in and take them out of the bag, but it makes it more difficult to fit oversized things inside.

It's a Reebok rucksack, black and what used to be a very garish pink before it faded over the decades to a gentle pastel hue, with still just about legible the motto "Pump It Up!" on the front. It's given me many years' service now, and before that it served my brother well as the bag he took his PE kit to school in. He hated PE, and probably transferred some of his dislike for the subject to his PE kit bag, so I think I did the bag a favour when I borrowed it in 1994 and never returned it. It's had a life of continued variety since then - it went to university with me, it's helped me move into my own rented room, followed by my first flat on my own, it's been to MSOs and othello tournaments, it's gone with me to the USA, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Malaysia, Bahrain and elsewhere, and it's still more or less in one piece. I think it's still good for a few years yet, before it becomes actually impossible to carry things around in it. Then maybe I'll have it framed and hang it up on the wall.

Zoomy Doubles For Darwin

Now this is the kind of thing that makes me really, really glad I'm a memory champion! Forwarded from the WMSC, an email from another TV producer:

Dear Secretary,

I am producing a series entitled Extraordinary Animals for Channel 5/BBC World, exploring animal behaviour and intelligence. Each 30 minute film will focus on an animal who has shown exceptional abilities and has furthered scientific understanding not only of its' species but also of our own.

One of our films features AI, a remarkable female chimp living at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University. Working with Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa and his team, she has mastered the ability to count to ten, memorise symbols for numbers (including Arabic), and words for colours. Both she, and her son Ayumu have shown remarkable ability in a memory test where numbers 1 to 9 appear on a screen randomly, are then covered up and the chimps remember their positions. They can do this at speed.

We have completed our filming in Japan with the professor and the chimps and it really is truly amazing to see them doing the test. However, to see just how skilled they are, I feel we need to see humans take the same test. It would be fascinating to see the result. As the chimps are extraordinary, I think it only fair to use extraordinary humans. It would be fantastic to find British memory champions/experts to take part – both adult and junior. Do you think you might be able to help or refer me elsewhere?

We plan to shoot the test in London in early October. Should you require any further information, please contact me.


Can the British memory champion out-memorise a chimpanzee? Wouldn't it be cool if the answer was no?

Was?

Why when I posted that blog entry did I get a screen saying

"Your blog post published successfully!
Blog anzeigen (in einem neuen Fenster)
Need to change it? Edit post | Create a new post"

I'm sure I haven't told Blogger to give me part of their status reports in German.

Nats

Not the annoying flying insects, the not at all annoying national othello championship. Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday, but Geoff and Michael were staying over and I still don't like blogging when someone's watching me. I don't know why, seeing as I'm aware that people are going read what I'm writing anyway. Still, I'm not sure I was a perfect host, as shown by the following conversation when Michael asked for black coffee:

Me: Oh, there isn't any. I normally keep some in the house for guests, but I took it down to the community centre so we'd have something to drink at the tournament, and it's still there. Ditto milk, sugar and tea.
Michael: What is there to drink, then?
Me: Water.
Michael: Fine. (going to the sink)
Me: Oh, also, the cold tap doesn't work.

Well, I never claimed this was the Ritz. Anyway, the competition all went fine - I had been worried that the venue, a cheap and somewhat shabby but extremely nice community centre not too far from the city centre, would have cancelled my booking, even though I called on Friday to confirm that it was still happening, or would otherwise take exception to us, but no, it was all okay. I must be a great organiser after all. We had the AGM before the championship started, which was as exciting as usual. Graham filled in as chairman while Aubrey's busy in America promoting his new book (just for a change - I think this is the fifth year in a row that we've called on Graham's services as official Acting Something-Or-Other).

By the time the competition was ready to start, we had a whopping 18 competitors. This forced me to cycle home and get another board, but we didn't start too late - luckily, really, since we only had the room till six before we had to make way for a live 'guitar vocalist'. Among the 18, just for maximum confusion value, were two Davids, two Jeremys, two Roberts and two Ians (well, one Ian and one Iain, but that's not a big help when you're reading out names). I think some othello players need to splash out on a name change to something more exotic and unique, like Imre or Aubrey.

I lost to Imre in round one, disappointingly enough - three wins in a row against him would have been something to really boast about - but made up for it with a really cool win against Michael in the third round. I've never done that before. Now I just need to work out how to beat Graham some time. Geoff's got the knack of that - he beat Graham in round two, while Iain beat Imre. That pretty much set the standard for the tournament as a whole - it really wasn't one of those championships where the highest-rated players beat everyone below them on the rating list, there were upsets and surprises all over the place. Iain drew with David Hand in round three, so at the end of the first day David Beck was on his own at the top of the table with three wins.

We went to a Thai restaurant in the evening, it being the first place we could find that wasn't full up. Actually, it was nearly empty when we all piled in. The food was good, though, but the service wasn't what you would call exceptional. A surprisingly extensive discussion about coca-cola led to Jeremy Dyer learning that they do in fact still make cans of cherry coke, and my revelation that in Bahrain, the coke cans still have old-fashioned ringpulls.

Today, I didn't manage to follow up that win over Michael with any more impressive results, unless you count winning on time against Ian when I was well and truly dead on the board. Graham also beat me 63-1, just to teach me not to get too cocky. Elsewhere, David Hand rather impressively made it two draws in a row with his first game of the day against David Beck, who then beat Graham but lost to Iain, who took the lead after five rounds but then lost to Imre and Graham, Geoff and Jeremy Das. Geoff was in contention for the lead all the way through, as were both Davids and Michael. It was anyone's guess who would end up in the final, but normality reasserted itself at the last, and it ended up being Graham versus Imre, for about the 73rd time. Imre won for the (genuinely) ninth time. Congratulations to him!

We had lunch in the Dunkirk Tavern down the road from the venue. Their food selection turned out to be rather less extensive than I'd assumed it would be from the sign outside promising inexpensive Sunday roasts - it didn't add "and no other kinds of food" - but it was very nice. All in all, the whole thing went really well, and a fun time was had by all! So I needn't have worried about it all going wrong and me getting the blame.

I'm gonna live forever

Okay, next Wednesday you all have to skive off work and/or come to Britain to see me on This Morning. They're even putting me up in a hotel in London on Tuesday night! And, in a shining example of effective time management, I've arranged a job interview at DHL at East Midlands Airport for late Wednesday afternoon. Although to be honest I'm not over-enthusiastic about the job.

But that's all for next Wednesday, and as the old saying goes, next Wednesday never comes. Tomorrow, on the other hand, we have the othello nationals! I would really like to do well in it, although as I've hardly played the game for months now, it's unlikely that I will. Still, it's my dream that one day my page on the othello wiki will mention something about my othello-playing ability.

TMWRNJ!

Okay, this is cool - This Morning want me on the show! I get to hang out on national TV with whoever hosts This Morning these days, possibly Phillip Schofield! Don't know what day yet, but I'll keep you informed. Also, I've just been talking to someone over the internet who didn't know my real name, and when I told him he said "You're Ben Pridmore? Wow!" I never meet people who've actually heard of me without being told! I'm really turning into a global celebrity! I'll have paparazzi going through my bins before you know it!

I also did that interview with the Rheinische Post today, so if you're a devoted reader, stay tuned. Alexei the UK correspondent says that he might be able to write the article some time soon if the paper stop insisting he write about Madeleine McCann and nothing else. So don't hold your breath.

It's that time of year again

It seems I'm probably going to have a big birthday party again this year. I always thought of myself as the type not to have a big bash, what with it being so depressing being as old and ancient as I am (I CAN'T be 31 next month, can I?), but after the last two years of having a get-together with all the gang, it's become one of those annual traditions. The plan is to try to find an apartment to rent for the weekend somewhere nice, like Manchester.

But 31? I don't know how that happened.

Holy Pillow Talk, Batman!

Ahh, bliss! BBC4 are repeating the sixties Batman series. Which, although I wasn't around in the sixties to watch, I have fond memories of thanks to the repeats on early-morning ITV in the eighties. Those were the days. And being on that channel and not bothering to turn the telly off led me to another interesting discovery - did you know Doris Day was still alive? It's news to me. I don't know why, but I'd just automatically assumed that she was dead. I'm going to have to look up all the other people I've been assuming were no longer with us now, just to make sure they're not going to be turning up unexpectedly on my doorstep. I'll start with Julius Caesar.

The documentary, which I turned off after five minutes despite being vaguely interested in Doris Day and her continued existence, was one of those horribly badly made ones with sort of semi-dramatisations of what the narrator is saying in the background, so that when it recounts how she was hit by a train at the age of thirteen we hear train sounds, clanging bells and a scream. Yuck. If the documentary about me contains anything even vaguely like that, I'm going to sue somebody. Or at least decry it in public as loudly as possible. The filming's finished now, I don't know if I mentioned that - Nick is now busy editing it into some kind of coherent whole (I don't envy him), and it'll be out either late this year or early next, I forget which. So mark your diaries.

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Okay, I've decided I need to get on with writing this book of mine. I don't even care about getting it published, I'm just sick of "How To Be Clever" sitting there in absentia and mocking me with its non-written-ness. Enough of this talking to people about it, composing chapters in my head, vaguely assuming it'll get done one of these days. It's been a good four years now since I started "writing" it, it's just silly now. So from now on, I'm really, properly going to work at it. And everybody reading this has to constantly pester me about it and complain that it's not on the shelves of Waterstone's yet. Okay?

Hanjie!

I seem to have got addicted to hanjie puzzles - those Japanese ones with the grid where you colour in squares according to the numbers at the sides. I've been doing them for years, since they first started appearing in Tough Puzzles magazine (called 'Tsunami' in those days, until they changed the name after the big real tsunami), but to pass the time on the way to Bahrain I bought a book of puzzles that had lots of hanjies in, and now I can't get enough of the things. I suppose there are worse things I could be addicted to. Like sudoku. That would just be weird.

They really are getting earlier every year!

The great thing about writing a trivial and pointless blog entry every night is that you can check back on the dates when I noticed the 2008 comic annuals were in the shops in the previous two years - September 10th in 2005, September 23rd last year (although they might have been out for a couple of weeks before that without me noticing) and September 8th this year! I really need to write about something more, well, pointful. But I think it's funny that as with the last revamp of the Dandy, the annual hasn't kept pace with developments. Do they really make these changes at the last minute? Or write the annuals so far in advance that changes to the lineup and style of strips in the weekly (or now fortnightly) comic don't get reflected in the annuals for another year? The Beano book has a rather good Billy-the-Cat-fights-General-Jumbo story that almost makes it worth buying, but not quite. And the latest nostalgia book gives a deserved namecheck to the artist who did those wonderful Baby-Face Finlayson strips in the eighties (although I didn't buy the book and now I can't remember his name, so I'll have to flick through it again in another shop. Or buy it, but we don't want to go mad here).

I did my flicking-through-annuals in Stoke-on-Trent today. I decided to spend the day browsing shops in a town I've never been to before, as an alternative to all the hustle and bustle of the previous couple of months (or as a way to stop myself doing nothing but play on the internet all day, as has been my habit much too much of late), so I went to the train station and picked the nearest town that was a shortish and cheapish train journey away. That turned out to be Doncaster, but then although the train arrived on time, it was announced that it would be staying in Derby for the foreseeable future because of signal problems, so I got off again, found the nearest and cheapest place in the other direction that I hadn't been to before, and splashed out on another £6.60 to go to Stoke. It's an unexceptional place, with a city centre even farther away from the train station than Cambridge. But at least now I can say I've been there!

The 8:15 From Manchester

Somewhere between the hour cards in Bahrain and getting back home, I've lost two of my good packs of cards. Numbers 8 and 15, to be precise (the boxes have numbers on, but I don't memorise them in fixed order outside memory competitions. That would be slightly more obsessive than I normally am). So I'll need to get some more if I want to attempt 36 packs again (and who knows, next year, if I've done enough practice, I might). I might get them from Manchester, to justify using the title of a Saturday morning children's show that few of my readers will remember, as my subject line tonight. But I'll probably get them from Derby instead, it's a lot more convenient.

Ooh, but I'll tell you what I have bought from Derby - a new black hat! From a market stall that was absolutely crawling with black hats! Why have I never noticed it before? Possibly it didn't exist before, but I have a feeling it did, and I just didn't pay attention to it. Still, this is a cool one. There's a feather in the hatband.

All the cool people read the Rheinische Post and Rapport

Hmm. Since coming second in the world memory championship, the only publications to ask me for an interview are the foreign correspondent of the Rheinische Post in Düsseldorf and Rapport magazine, a high-production glossy A4 that goes out to all UK Peugeot owners. I suppose that's the best I can hope for.

Anyway, there's been too much memory stuff taking over my life lately. I need to get on with the other things I waste time with - the othello nationals the weekend after next, for example. I've hardly played for the last two months, I really need to get some practice in. Not to mention do my treasurer's report for the AGM (not that anyone really cares about it, of course...)

Aorta

I had a quick interview on Radio Derby again this morning, and in the waiting room there was a copy of the latest newsletter of AORTA - the Allenton, Alvaston and Osmaston Residents Together Association. This is, I'm fairly certain, the worst acronym ever invented. Firstly, it should be AAORTA or even AAAORTA, depending on whether you count the 'and'. Secondly, "Residents Together Association" sounds like a horribly contrived way to make a word out of the initials. Thirdly, why in the name of sanity would you want a residents' association to be called Aorta? Okay, they were always going to be struggling for a name when they decided to form an association spanning three districts of Derby that all start with a vowel, but there's no law saying you HAVE to make an acronym out of the association's name.

The brains in Bahrain fail mainly on the cards-based disciplines

"Names" would have worked better in the subject line, but I did okay in that one this time round. I did miss not doing daily blogged updates of the world championships like last year, but there wasn't internet access from the hotel. So that leaves me having to sum up the whole of the last week in one entry tonight before moving onto whatever I feel like writing tomorrow. Or maybe I'll spread it over a few days. There's a lot to write, anyway.

I got into the Bahrain International Airport at about 8:30pm local time - night falls there earlier than it does here, and it was already fully dark by the time I was leaving the airport. But even so, stepping outside I was knocked off my feet by the staggering heat - it was well over thirty degrees celsius and humid with it, so that you're soaked in sweat almost instantly. But the hotel was pleasantly air-conditioned (a bit too much so at times, in fact - on the first day the competition room was freezing, and thereafter it varied from too cold to too hot as people tried to grapple with the air con controls) and very swanky-looking. Most of the other competitors and organisers were staying there too, except the ones who couldn't afford it and had to make do with one of the cheaper ones down the road, and Tony Buzan and Ray Keene who were staying in a posher place, which gave the whole event a more social, friendly kind of feel. The hotel had a seafood restaurant where I ate the first night with an assortment of other memorisers (from memory I think it was Boris, Simon, Hannes, Ed, Lukas and somebody else who has slipped out of my brain right at this moment. Idriz. Sorry.)

Which reminds me that I shared my shuttle-bus to the hotel from the airport with a retired Swedish-American couple who were touring the middle east and were thrilled to learn that the World Memory Championship was happening in their hotel. They were only there for the first day, but they came along to see what it was like in the morning, even though I'd told them it wasn't much fun for spectators.

Anyway, the hotel also had a Harvesters pub which served excellent food, and we had lunches provided during the competition, so there was no shortage of decent grub. Which maybe explains why we didn't all lose weight like the Sunday Times promised we would. I only had the one day for sightseeing, and I had Nick following me around with the camera, but I did my best to see some interesting sights around Manama. Going outside in the daytime was practically lethal - the temperature got up to about forty degrees and it was a case of having to scamper between patches of shade and try not to look too much like a tourist (kind of a wasted effort, seeing as we were conspicuously white, sweating like the Halal equivalent of pigs and carrying a big TV camera). The coolest bit was seeing the multiple giant billboards advertising the WMC and the "Festival of the Mind" that accompanied it. This isn't something that's ever happened before, as far as I know. There was plenty of media coverage too - we got full-page spreads in the local newspapers every day ("Mind Wizard Pridmore In Race For Title") was my favourite headline.

We only managed 32 competitors, which is rather a step down from the last couple of years, but only to be expected because of the exotic location. And there were plenty of good ones among that lot, including a gang from China, competing in the WMC for the first time. The competition itself started off with some entertaining bickering over the rules - Gunther had asked for an extra page of abstract images, Ed took exception, and they first decided not to allow it, then changed their minds back again in the end. And then the abstract images sheets turned out to have been very badly photocopied (the printer the organisers had arranged turned out not to come with toner), making them much harder to memorise and making the extra page unnecessary after all. It's all part of the fun of the championships.

I got a passable score in that, then broke my world record in the binary digits again, with 4140. Woo! I got an entirely acceptable score in hour numbers too, the second-best after Wu Tiansheng, and was about neck-and-neck with Gunther after the first day, even though day one has his three best disciplines.

Day two was less successful - I honestly don't think I was really up to match fitness, not having practised as much as I should, and by the end of the day (we ran three or four hours behind schedule every day, as is traditional), I was tired and not concentrating properly. But I got a reasonable score in names and faces, a pretty cool 365 in speed numbers, and an 86 in historic dates. But in this one Hannes stole the show, with the only other world record of this year's WMC - 99, beating my old record of 96 that I thought was safe as houses. And then in the hour cards I had a total disaster. Like I said, I wasn't concentrating properly, but I nonetheless decided to go for 33, and my recall was horrific. I filled in 22 complete packs on the recall papers, but a lot of them involved educated and uneducated guesses, so I wasn't at all surprised to see a score of 10.5 packs (you get a half if there's one card wrong in the recall - seems I wrote the king of diamonds down twice without noticing) the next morning.

That put me fractionally in the lead after day two, but then I'm always in the lead after day two. I think I have been in every WMC since 2003, oh, except 2005 when I was leading after historic dates but then fell behind. But I generally find a way to mess things up on the final day. I ended up with 159 on words, with several annoying mistakes when I was convinced I had it nearly perfect. Spoken numbers was again entertaining - the playback stuttered at a couple of points and ran some numbers together instead of playing them at one per second. Lots of people protested that we should do the third trial again, Ed again complained loudly that we shouldn't, largely on the grounds that he had the highest score as things should. I also said that we shouldn't, mainly because I thought Gunther would get a better score if we did it again, and we were still neck-and-neck as it was. Then I changed my mind, realising that that wasn't much of a reason, and Ed also backed down, having been convinced by Lukas that he could improve his own score still further and break the world record.

And in the end, the only one to improve his score was me, with a new personal best 129. Which was cool, and put me once again, fractionally in the lead going into the speed cards.

Remembering last year, when I tried two fast times and failed them both, I decided to be sensible and go for a slow and safe one first time round so as to make sure Simon couldn't steal second place from me. Well, there was a lot of money in it this time, not just pride. I was thrilled to see that the timer I was randomly given (one of the 35 they had there - my ten and the 25 that the WMSC had bought) was the one I used for the world record in Highley in July - it hadn't been used since, and the time came up on the screen when I turned it on. What a good omen, I thought!

I did my safe time of 57.8 seconds, and the recall was perfect. Not a single card I had to think about, it reeled out of my brain flawlessly. I should have gone for a fast one, I thought, irritated. Gunther did 57.1 seconds. That left him needing 50 seconds or so on the second trial to beat me, if I didn't improve at all.

Now, I should clarify something here about the way I memorise cards. I can NOT do a pack in 45 seconds and make it safe. I can go through the pack once (thirty seconds or so) and make it risky, or twice (one minute or so) and make it safe. If I try to go through once, slowly, it makes no difference at all. It's still risky. It's even more risky, in fact, because my brain isn't used to the change in tempo, and my mind starts wandering. I did take my time, knowing Gunther can't do below 40 seconds, and recorded a time of 32 or thereabouts, but in the recall I switched a couple of images around and got it wrong. Gunther got his pack right in a just-fast-enough 47, and won the championship. Drattles.

Still, never mind, eh? Next year. Yes, I'm seriously annoyed with myself. I really, really wanted to win this one. But it really is great that Gunther's finally got a world title under his belt, after all those second and third places over the years and all the work he's done in making 'memory sports' the thing it is today. He gave a great speech at the prizegiving ceremony, praising me in a very flattering kind of way. The prizegiving was a little excessively long, as usual, with the top three in each discipline coming up onto the stage one at a time to get their medals and cheques and rounds of applause, and that was only after the same had been done for all the sponsors and arbiters and helpers (all of whom very much deserve applause and rewards, of course!). Then we had the announcements of the team results, in which the scores were wrong again - they were probably using the same software as last year without having noticed - but the positions were right. Germany won, naturally, and they announced the top three Germans as Gunther, Simon and Hannes, instead of Gunther, Simon and Boris, meaning that Boris had to stay down in the audience taking pictures and Hannes had to limp over to the stage and be helped up the stairs one more time than was strictly necessary. Then we all came up one last time for the prizes for the top ten - I'm now the proud owner of another rather nice glass trophy, not as stylish as the UK championship one but still a lot better than a tin cup, and cheques totalling $6,050, which I'll have to pay into the bank as soon as I can find my chequebook.

My business cards ("Ben Pridmore, idiot") caused quite a stir this year - everybody wanted one, and I soon gave away the ten or so I had left. I'll have to get more printed on the machine at the train station. And I'm not going to say anything about the allegations of cheating against one competitor in the speed cards event (no, not Gunther), without knowing every side of the story. I'm sure I'll think of more important reminiscences about the long weekend over the course of the next few days, and I'll be sure to share them with you.

I'm back!

Wow, it's a while since I've been away from the internet for practically a whole week, there's a lot to catch up on when you come back. Plus I'm worn out by the mental exertions of the last few days (although my swanky hotel room came complete with weighing scales, so I can confirm that I didn't lose between four and nine pounds a day. What a swizz). I'll do a proper blog tomorrow about everything that's happened (and thus keep those of you who weren't following the results on the internet in suspense a bit longer, or else leave you confidently believing that I won...)

Who will play me in the movie of my life?

In the Sunday Times article about the World Memory Championship yesterday, I'm described as "a bespectacled, slightly plumper version of the actor Rick Moranis". The writer of the article, who also believes that all memory competitors use a memory method called "mind mapping", has never met me (we talked on the phone for five minutes), and so I'm surprised to find that he thinks I'm plump. Or more so than Rick Moranis, anyway. Okay, I probably am, but how dare he conclude that I'm plump just based on the pictures of me that appeared in the Telegraph and the Mail? Everyone knows that their cameras add ten pounds and an opinion about illegal immigrants.

Well, according to the same article, we can expect to "temporarily lose between 4lb and 9lb of weight each day" we're out there, so when I come home three stone lighter, Rick Moranis will be the slightly plumper version of Ben Pridmore. Still, he's not the only person I've been compared to lately - the woman who arranged the interview on Central News insisted (before meeting me) that I'm a dead ringer for David Gest. I don't see that at all (although I've admittedly only seen one photo of him, I had no idea who he was and had to pretend I knew what everyone was talking about and then look him up when I got home - I don't watch "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here").

Another thing that Rick Moranis and David Gest have in common is that they're 54 years old. I'm thirty.

Just to make it clear

Last night's blog was genuinely written by my brother, it wasn't me being silly. Normal blogging service will resume tomorrow! And then stop a couple of days later, because I'm flying to Bahrain on Wednesday and I don't know whether I'll be able to keep in touch while I'm there...

I'm drunk. I agreed to let my brother write my blog tonight.

Yer is my turn ter write blog, am moderately drunk but w'd like ter make couple of points. Firstly, m' brother is splendid, with being the world champion and all. Second, watch our televison programme as will have us singing. We were splendid at that too. Forthly, I would just like to add to ALICIA that your unique flat-faced beatuy has quite won my heart, and though I will be leaving Blaze Publishing soon for life of penury I would like you to join me in it. If its a deal-breaker, would add that preferred Lucy in sales before yer started but have gone off that harridan in preference f'r y'r. Lastly, m'brother does good Cher impersonation and is not bad at puling youthful second vocal in Shoop Shoop Song either. That's it, am done. One more thing, has great falsetto voice and will do so in Bahrain.

Cleaning is bad

I might have mentioned that I tidied up my flat recently. This is, of course, a terrible thing to do, and only brings sadness and complications to everyone's life. The major complication here is that I lost a bit of paper with legs scribbled on it. I'm still trying to work on drawing when I have a spare moment, and recently in a spare moment I was trying to get the hang of drawing someone running. And one of these doodles looked EXACTLY right, so I thought "well, I'm keeping this, so that when I have a bit more spare time and feel like drawing the upper half of a running person, I'll just copy these legs and I'll be sorted". But now I've lost the bit of paper, so I'm back to square one. I'm never going to be an artist at this rate.

I really haven't done enough training

What with being ill and/or lazy, I've really skimped on the all-important last-week-before-the-world-championship memory practice. And with my brother and the TV people coming round this weekend, I'll have to be really disciplined on the bank holiday Monday and do a whole solid day of non-stop cramming numbers and cards and things into my brain, just to get myself up to match fitness. Then it's give-the-poor-brain-a-rest time until the competition starts next Friday. Woo! And by give the brain a rest, I mean maybe spend some time working on a better system for abstract images, because I can do that without cluttering up my memory banks and it really needs doing.

Wow, only a week and a bit, and this whole memory mania of the last couple of months will be all over. No more competitions planned for months and months and months. It's sad...

Sartorial elegance

I found my old leather waistcoat recently, and I think I'm going to have to start wearing it again. It always looked cool, and since I seem unlikely to find a new hat before the world championships, and the cloak is too big and bulky to cart to Bahrain with me, I need some item of stupid-looking clothing to make me stand out from the crowd.

I'm also being forced to the conclusion that I'm going to have to take my big rucksack to Bahrain. I hate travelling with a big bag, but I've got a lot of cards and clothes and things to ship over there, and there really is the possibility of me having to take a trophy home with me (although I hate to leave space for that, because it jinxes the whole thing), and there's no way I can manage it with my little bag. Drat.

Snotty follow-up

For some reason, last night's brief post got lots of comments that I wanted to reply to, so, as an alternative to thinking of something else to write, because I still feel rotten and I think I'm going to have an early night, I'll reply here.

Jemfy: Hugs!

Gregory: As I said in the comments section, you (and anyone else interested in learning about my memory systems or just wanting to chat with other memory competitors) should check out the memorysports yahoo group. I can't remember now why I called it memorysports, when I think the phrase 'memory sports' is silly and never use it myself, but I did, and it's too late to do anything about it now. You'll find answers to all your questions (or failing that, a place to ask your questions and subsequently get answers) there.

But in brief - I have a single object for each pair of two cards, I place three of these in each location, and thus use only nine locations for each pack of cards. I'm all in favour of squishing as much information as possible into each location, others aren't, I think everyone should use the system that works best for them. Play around and see what feels good. I go through the deck by turning over two cards at a time and putting them in a pile in front of me. This is monstrously inefficient, although I've practiced enough over the years that I can do it really, really, REALLY fast, and I'm planning after the WMC to switch to fanning through the pack with the whole thing in my hand. I think that'll be faster.

And when you say "I started doing this in July and I am completely stuck at 1:45", do you mean you're under two minutes for a pack of cards and you've only been doing it for a month? If so, that's pretty darn impressive and I don't think you've got anything to worry about. These things take time and practice. You'll get faster.

Anonymous person whose comment I deleted: I'm flattered that you think I deserve more publicity than another well-known memory man who's on TV a lot, but you could have conveyed the point without launching into a foul-mouthed tirade of personal abuse against this other guy, followed by a surprising and equally passionate digression on the subject of the media's anti-Serbian bias. This blog really isn't a place for insulting other people (unless I think they really deserve it), sexual swearwords (unless it's in a context that makes me giggle) or politics (unless I want to say nasty things about the Daily Mail in return for them giving me lots of free publicity - and the whole Daily Mail thing, I should make clear, is more of a private joke between me and a Mail-reading but otherwise sensible friend than something I deeply believe in).

Katy: Shnuzzles! And I postponed the interview on Friday, went to it on Monday morning instead when I was less busy at my current job. It went quite well, but I don't think they're going to offer me the job - mainly because it'll involve frequent trips to their other office in Windsor, and I don't drive. Shame, but such is life.

Simon: Did you tell me that you've started using a two-card-image system? If so, I forgot about it. Good luck with it! It's a lot of work to get it fixed in your head, but I really think it's worth it.

Everybody who couldn't be bothered to comment: Just to show there's no hard feelings, I'll answer an imaginary question of yours too. What's my favourite unusual snack that would make most people go yuck, you say? Well, I like cheese and jam sandwiches. It's something I picked up from my dad, it's a strange taste but I really like it. I just had one for tea, and while it's made me feel sick, that's probably more to do with me not being well than the sandwich itself.

Snotty

Ugh, I really am feeling rotten today. Just thought I should let you know, in case anyone wants to give me a hug to make me feel better, or something. Hope I get rid of this cold before the world championships. But speaking of which, the Sunday Times want to talk to me now! That's definitely a step in the right direction from the Daily Mail! Although what with work and needing some last-minute practice, I could do without the distraction...

Lemsip

I've got a bad cold, I haven't done nearly as much memory training as I intended to do this weekend, I'm fed up with it raining all the time and I think I'm getting arthritis in my right thumb. Also, I've got to go to work tomorrow. And I bought a lottery ticket yesterday and didn't get a single number.

Still, to look on the bright side, I can get Nick Jr 2 on my telly now, so I get to watch Maggie and the Ferocious Beast every evening!

Also, I currently hold seven of the seventeen memory competition world records (eighteen if you count the poem), including four of the ten world championship ones, and I'm wondering how many more I can get. I'd really like to have more than half of them some day - that'd be something cool to boast about to the general public, who wouldn't have a clue what I was on about. I can maybe get the speed numbers record back if it all goes well in Bahrain, hour numbers is a lot less likely (Gunther will probably beat his own record and go over 2000 this year), spoken numbers is within the realms of possibility, but only just. Words, names and abstract images, no chance at all. But on the other hand, I would hope that the four records I hold already are pretty safe, even if I don't beat them this time out.

Another claim to fame I'm after is winning the world championship more than three times in a row. I realised yesterday in the course of the Mail interview that nobody's ever done that before. Of course, that's a goal that it's going to take me until 2010 to achieve (by which time it will be the future and we'll be holding the space world memory championships on the moon), so we're talking long-term ambitions here. So that ought to keep me still interested, even if I do win it again this time!

I'm gonna live forever

I now get 185 pages on a google search for my name, and most of them are about me. Now that's fame.

I did the interview with the Mail this morning - they also wanted to photograph me in the Brazilian Mystery Cloak, which is going to become more famous than the hat at this rate (assuming I find a new hat). I can envisage my clothing having fights and not speaking to one another.

Weekend plans

Memory, memory and more memory, with a bit of being interviewed and a bit of cleaning up the flat if I'm good. I've made significant strides in cleaning up the living room tonight, after a good solid chunk of memory practice, so who knows what I might achieve if I keep this up?

Two weeks till the world championships! Woo!

I don't care if it's technically summer!

All the shops that might be expected to sell me a new black fedora or similar are only selling 'summer hats' - either straw hats or floppy cloth ones. This is disgraceful. Yes, wearing a big black hat in the summer sun is uncomfortable and not something that any sane person would do, but why are the shops so prejudiced against the insane? I'm going to have to go to Bahrain wearing one of the straw cowboy hats I've had sitting in my flat since that cowboy murder party years ago (the straw hat I bought in Stuttgart got ruined last Sunday when the TV people decided it would be cool to film me cycling in the rain). I'm not sure the straw cowboy hats are good memory hats - I can prop my stopwatch up on them, but it sometimes falls over. It doesn't do that with a good hat. I need a big black hat. Maybe someone else will leave one on a train so I can steal it?